I’ve decided to tell Lena about Dada’s lie upon my return from Hazaribagh, presenting it as something I only learnt there. Her opinion of him will breach rock bottom (frack it, shall we say), but at least it will spare her days of worry.
Likewise with Ma, even though I’ll stay with her on the way to and from Haz. The biggest revelation from our recent Skype interviews has been the depth of her mistrust of Dada. Not Didi, or even their mother, whom she displaced in Baba’s life: it’s as though all her discomfort and anxiety about the divide in our family is focused on the figure of my brother. I was amazed not just at the strength of her antipathy even after all these years, but also that I hadn’t once noticed it as a boy. At least now I was finally persuaded of one of her claims when she’d insisted that Dada had to leave our house — that they had never got along. I had disbelieved her then: I had genuinely thought we worked as a unit.
But even now, despite my repeated exhortations to try to think of nicer moments, all she had recalled about Dada on Skype were incidents such as him kicking me in the crotch with his ‘Naughty Boy’ black shoes at my fifth birthday party, late in the evening after the other children had left and the two of us were playing with some of my presents. Apparently, an hour or so later I had even gone to bed, but then such was the pain in my abdomen that Baba had had to drive me to our doctor’s house at 10.30 that night.
And the time a few months later he’d stuck some chewed gum into my hair and then ripped it off, leaving me with a small patch to this day on which the hair hasn’t fully returned. I remember well the aftermath of this incident, and not just from the spot on my head. Someone persuaded my parents that rubbing the juices of baby onions on the bald patch would stimulate hair growth (cross my heart this is true!), and for the next two months, one or other of them (usually Baba) religiously sat me down at the dining table each evening and rubbed away, both our eyes brimming with tears, Baba probably cursing Dada while trying to hold my head in place, while I must have been wriggling away from the onions and also struggling to read through the tears the comic or storybook in front of me. It’s a wonderful image from this distance, although Ma remains blind to its comedy; I keep telling her it was a kind of family time Dada had bestowed upon us.
Or the three-day hunger strike he conducted about being given a bike of his own, shortly after moving in with us a couple of years later, which of course led to the outcome Ma was even more worried about — I insisted on the same privileges and also got my way, although mine was a smaller bike, which was the compromise my parents enforced (and Dada supported, for the obvious reason of maintaining his older-brother edge).
Lena knows these stories too, and so now if I say that at the age of thirty-nine Dada messed with my head by lying about something as grave as our sister’s death, but that I’m going to visit him anyway, I think my mother and wife will put out an ad for a tantrik of their own.
As for me, perhaps it’s only a denialist’s way of displacing some rightful and necessary anger, but I can’t help also seeing Dada’s side of things during each of these undoubted transgressions: where Lena and Ma focus on the harm done to us, I try in vain to point them in each case to their ‘villain’s’ context. Attending my fifth birthday party at our three-storey home from the single room the three of them were sharing at the time in Dada’s great-uncle’s crumbling house in Bagbazar — how different was that from glimpsing my privileged weekdays with Mira here in Wellington thirty years later? Wouldn’t you have wanted to give that lucky twit of a stepbrother the jolt of his life or a quick kick in the nuts when no one was looking?
What I’ve often wondered as an adult is what Baba was aiming for in bringing Dada and Didi, although never their mother, all the way to south Calcutta to visit us on occasions like that (these stopped completely after the chewing-gum episode: the next time Dada and Didi came to our house was two years later, the night their mother was taken to hospital in what turned out to be her final battle with cancer). And why I was never asked — and never sought myself, I must admit — to attend any of my siblings’ birthdays in return.
I also remember Dada’s closed-door satyagraha about his bike: he really stuck to his guns and ate nothing at home for three days (although he did make sure to have nearly two lunches from the school canteen each afternoon, and might have smuggled home a couple of samosas or sandwiches for the evenings). Where Ma tells me now that she saw only the wish to be spitefully disruptive, and a total disregard for the example he was setting for a younger brother who wasn’t yet ready to be out on the streets, I see a ten-year-old who might well have had the same argument with his own Ma if she’d been alive, who was both fiercely angry about the reason they had had to move here, as well as a little excited about this new, unexplored part of town. And most of all, someone who was looking to assert something at this most helpless moment in his life, when his father had had to take them into his other family only because their Ma had died. There had to be something he could head out with that was just his own.
And at thirty-nine, he came to New Zealand, heard our national spiel from all and sundry about earthquake preparedness, and decided to give me a shake himself. The shame, Ma, is not just his for the trick he chose to play: what about the fact that neither you nor I knew enough about my sister to spot this most absurd of bluffs?
In short, the basic import of this entire section of arguments carried out with people who never once got to hear them: how I justified not telling the two most important grown-ups in my life about the most reckless thing I ever did.